Mary Zuccato

I’m the COO of Every Cure, a start-up nonprofit that was funded in the most recent Audacious cohort! We are on a mission to save and improve patients lives by identifying opportunities for repurposing FDA-approved drugs for additional indications, particularly for areas of unmet need such as rare diseases. Our co-founder, David Fajgenbaum, is giving a talk on Thursday and I hope you’ll be there!

Drug repurposing can advance life-saving treatments at a fraction of the cost and time of novel drug discovery. Many diseases share common mechanisms in the body, and the average drug binds to more than 30 proteins, each of which may play a role in treating different diseases. In the past, drug repurposing has relied on serendipity and been focused on specific diseases, but Every Cure works to flip this process and look for shared connections between all 18,500 existing diseases and all 4,000 approved drugs simultaneously. Shared connections aren’t always obvious, but advanced AI allows Every Cure to maximize the chance of finding effective drugs, searching the forest for low-hanging fruit instead of one tree at a time. With this approach, Every Cure will unlock generic repurposed treatments for 15-25 diseases by 2030, alleviating suffering for millions of people worldwide and ensuring that every drug it advances helps the most people possible.